DICE: Star Wars Battlefront Focuses on “Some of the Really Core Fantasies” From the Original Films

October 17, 2015
Written by Zarmena Khan

With a month to go before Star Wars Battlefront releases, DICE is busy answering tons of questions regarding launch features, future/current in-game content, and more – some of which we’ve already shared with our readers here. In a recent interview with Redbull, Battlefront Design Director, Niklas Fegraeus, was asked which famous Star Wars set pieces are included in the game, to which he said that the Star Wars universe is “enormously huge” and while it isn’t possible to include everything, Battlefront focuses on “some of the really core fantasies” from the original films.

When it comes to what you can include, I think the Star Wars universe is just enormously huge and everything is super-cool – so there’s not enough time in a life to do everything. But the things that we have focused on are some of the really core fantasies from the original films. Like fighting big AT-AT walkers, for example, or being Darth Vader with a red lightsaber and force powers in hand, or flying X-Wings versus TIE fighters, which is another really core fantasy. There’s more to that as well. The games have tonnes of modes and a lot of really, really fun toys to play with.

Creating Battlefront‘s levels doesn’t sound like an easy feat. Fegraeus revealed that the development team went to filming locations, and that DICE sent people on planes and in cars to “lots of different places around the globe” with “lots of cameras” to create scenes. He further detailed the process as follows:

And when they come back we have to gather all that data, structure it in a way that’s useful digitally, and then we have a lot of software and pipelines and workflows and so forth to actually make it into Frostbite [DICE’s game engine]. When you have those assets available you can start with design and how it comes together. You need to render it properly, so you need programmers and engineers to create some kind of pipeline to make all these assets look the way they’re supposed to look. It’s quite a long process – it takes a lot of months and a lot of people.

When asked if there was anything in the previous Battlefront games that DICE wanted to change in its upcoming title, Fegraeus said that there wasn’t anything in particular that needed to be changed, and that it was more of a question of “‘How do we adopt some of those older mechanics into a new era of games?’” As for the same old question about Battlefront being a Battlefield re-skin, DICE said that the studio’s guiding principle was creating an “amazing, authentic Star Wars sandbox” so it’s not a re-skin, which is something we agree with based on our time with the beta.

In other Star Wars Battlefront news, EA was asked on Twitter if the game will have clone wars, to which the company said that it will have more details regarding the season pass soon. Now we’re not sure if this is a subtle hint that there will be clone wars DLC or not, but we’ll update our readers when we have more information. In the meanwhile, stay tuned as EA continues to reveal more information leading up to Battlefront‘s launch on November 17, including a few more heroes and villains to unveil.